Empty Headed
by nothing-chan
Summary: When you lose your memory, I wonder where it goes. Can you ever get it back? Because I loved Eren, but I wanted to look in his eyes and not feel guilty anymore. He'd forgotten everything, but not me, and I felt the vomit rise in my throat as I watched him sleep to the sound of my voice and the distance of the ocean.


"Eren?"

No No No No No No No No No No.

"Armin? You look really big? What happened?"

No.

He reached out and touched my belt, maneuver gear discarded into a heap in the corner, tracing the leather straps that winded down my leg.

"Cool outfit! Where did you find it? It looks like a real soldier's uniform!"

A bandage wound around Eren's head, tight, crushing his skull inward to keep it from gorging out and falling apart, now just cracks and fragments of skull patched together to hold a few strands of brain matter inside. A bit still seeped through, staining his forehead red, chocolate brown hair pushed back and frayed in all directions.

The light from the hospital room's window hit his eyes and he shielded his tender gaze with his hand, blinking into his tan fingers.

"Ouch, my head is killing me. Why does it feel like I've been sleeping for so long? Where's Mikasa?"

I watched while the doctor explained to him, he had hit his head, he was in the hospital, Armin will take you home.

"I hit my head? Does Dad know?"

"Your father is away on business, don't worry."

"What about Mom?"

Yes, what about Mom?

What lie would they feed him, spoon into his slack jawed mouth, funnel down his nose and up into his empty head. His mother was where? Long digested in a Titan's stomach, swirling in juices of acid and blood, buoyant in the remains of other humans and the dust of their obliterated home, was the easy answer, the true one.

"She's fine, she was just here but went home to rest. She'll be happy to see you're awake, you've been asleep for a long time, Mr. Jaeger."

Eren smiled, running his fingers nimbly over the bandages on his head, stopping at a spot where the blood pooled and squelched under his pressure. He winced, pressing again into the wound before I shot my hand out to stop him.

"Stop it; you'll just make yourself bleed more."

The boy frowned, before using his other free hand to peruse the cloth on his scalp, fascinated by the blood beginning to weep out of other spots on his extravagant wound, squishing his fingers deep inside the bruised skin.

"Uh-oh, looks like it's time to change your bandages, I'll go get a nurse. Do you mind coming with me, Mr. Arlert?"

I nodded, wriggling my fingers that still clutched onto Eren's hand. They were the same, larger than mine, calloused, a light brown that caught the sunlight and bounced back into your eyes, cracked knuckles gleaming, but he did not hold me the same way, possessive and hard and with the vigor of a newborn foul. Instead, it sat limp in my grip and let me overpower his haggard, stringy limbs.

I wondered what it was like to be a child in a titan's body.

* * *

When I left the room, a forest of soldiers awaited me, fingernails chewed raw and hair severed and broken from being twisted. They looked up, gnawing their lips, eyes whispering trilogies of questions at the boy standing in front of them.

"He… doesn't remember anything…"

They sank into their chairs and sat silently as one of them sobbed, screaming into their palms. I caught Mikasa's eye and she nodded, twirling out of the building without a single word.

* * *

When you lose your memory, I wonder where it goes.

Does your mind take a large eraser, scrub across the folds of your brain until they are abraded away, raw and ready to be written upon once again? Do the left over fragments of conversations simply float away, through the fissures in your bones and out into the open air? Or are they like parasites that never leave, lurking in the glutinous material surrounding your mind and leeching onto the walls of your skull, imbedding themselves in the back of your eyes and in the roots of your nose and on the pearls of your teeth?

Can you ever get them back?

Because I loved Eren, even when he was a child, but I wanted to look in his eyes and not feel guilty anymore.

When they told me Eren had hit his head on an expedition, that he was locked away in a hospital room with intensive care, through the day and night, it did not really matter to me. Eren could just heal right? Turn into a Titan and sew up the valleys in his head until he walked out of the room with the same explosive smile, the same never ending gait.

But they said it didn't work like that, and Eren would not wake up for a very long time, and he most likely would forget a plethora of things, maybe everything, maybe even about me.

* * *

"But when he does wake up, you have to take care of him. Remind him who he is, if he's forgotten."

"Why not Mikasa?"

"What, do you not want to do it?" Corporal Levi uncrossed his slight legs and continued to lean against the brick wall, "We need Mikasa, she's the best recruit we have."

Ah, so it was because I was dispensable, that I understood. I could drop dead at any time, what would it matter? This is the way to think during a war, of course.

"Besides, you're the only one who can do it," Levi stood to face me, his python eyes fixed on my ear, "I know how smart you are, we all do. It's your job to use your brain to unravel his."

I watched him slowly train his gaze onto mine and I felt a small bud of strangulation begin in the back of my throat, my uniform suddenly too hot, my boots far too crowded.

"What if I can't?" The crack in my voice was unintentional but left me swallowing rigidly, spine stacked in respect and mouth stale.

"Then we find another human who can turn into a Titan," He took his leave, elven feet trailing one after the other, "But until that time, he is our priority, and the most important thing in humanity's possession. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Corporal."

* * *

He had only forgotten our adult life, the breach of Wall Maria, the Colossal Titan, our military training, his mother's death. He still remembered me, and Mikasa, and the outside world, but nothing more, as if time had stopped the day the wall had been mangled and severed to bits. He still considered us children, absently wondering why his legs were so hairy, or why his voice sounded off.

But this didn't matter to him, all because he was so thrilled to go outside, jumping like a child and dashing through the hospital's hallways to make it through the door, leaving me to trail after him with bags and papers and a key to our new home.

The house was provided by the Survey Corps, to help me nurture Eren, somewhere deep in the troughs of Wall Rose, close to the hospital and a collection of soldiers if something tasteless were to happen. There were no mirrors, nothing reflective, a peaceful life of absolute solitude.

They were worried, though I was sure nothing bad would happen, with the way Eren's eyes suckled in the new surroundings, how he jumped onto his freshly made bed, found niches and corners to hide things in, satiated himself with the food I made, he was the Eren from my past, one who was unaware of his Titan abilities.

He was still Eren, however, his brashness, the curve of his nose, and the plunge of his eyebrow could attest to that, just an Eren who did not know how to shave, and came out of the bathroom with welts all over his face and tears in his eyes.

He spoke of his family on a daily basis, too often for me. I was running out of lies to tell, I was starting to wither away from the shame of keeping a world so shattered and fractured away from the person who experienced it the most.

"I don't understand why I can't just go and see Mom and Mikasa, I'm perfectly healthy!" Eren drove a spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth as if to prove this fact as I silently buttered a slice of bread.

"I know, but it's the hospitals rules, so we can't break them. What if something were to happen while you were away?"

"Dad could take care of me," Eren grumbled, twirling his silverware. I said nothing.

"Anyway, how am I going to get into the Recon Corps like this? They'll never accept me if I have to keep being babied by the hospital!"

The boundless guilt began to rise in my throat as I watched his fully grown body shovel away food while his mind processed everything in front of him with a child's heart. The Recon Corps had accepted him, the Recon Corps had loved him, I loved him, but he didn't know, he couldn't remember.

"I hear the Recon Corps came back from another successful mission," A straight lie as I bit onto my fork, scraping it against my teeth and letting the silvery twang ring out into the stillness.

"Wow, really? That's awesome! I can't wait to go with them one day."

We ate in silence for an undetermined amount of time, my plate more destroyed by the stabs of my knife than by actual eating. These meals were not rationed; part of the plan to inspect Eren before telling him the truth of the walls and our world, but my stomach was always too full of putrid bile to stuff anything in it.

"Eren, why do you want to join the Recon Corps?" I asked before he got up to clean his plate, his green eyes latching onto my downturned face.

"To see the outside world, of course! You're the one who told me about it, you should know," He jumped out of his chair, smiling luminously, "I'm tired of being stuck here, I just want to beat the Titans and see the world, just like we said we always would."

There was no bloodlust in his voice, no hatred, only wonder and excitement. Why should there be? His mother was alive, his home was waiting for him, he had never felt pain.

I waited until he left the room to cry.

* * *

I spent a lot of my time crying, in all actuality. When Eren had retired to his room I curled up into my own distended bed and buried myself in the frigidness of the sheets. My chest hurt and my throat was raw to the point of being sore the next day from screaming with a suffocated mouth. I cried about Eren, about Mikasa, about how no one had spoken to me in months, all of them most likely dead, scratching at the walls of a Titan's stomach. I cried about my grandfather, I cried about my parents, I cried about adult things and childish things, I cried so much I could have collected my tears and shown Eren the ocean. I cried because I could not make him remember, then I cried myself to the point of a blissful sleep and an empty dream.

One night, I wasn't crying at all when the door to my room opened haltingly, a figure stalking in the shadows.

"Eren?" He shuffled on his feet, stalled in the doorway, rocking back and forth and back and forth with the sounds of the street outside.

"H-Hey, Armin, I just had a really crazy dream…" I understood what that meant, and uncurled my arms from behind my head.

"Wanna sleep together tonight?" He nodded and made his way over to the bed, crawling in as far away as he could and amassing himself into a large ball.

"You left the door open," I commented and he grumbled into the sheets, making me snort slightly. I moved a little closer, observing the way he continued to breathe in his shell of blanket and body, shifting up and down and back and forth. "What did you dream about?"

"I don't want to talk about it," I backed off, but he migrated closer, as if to whisper something enigmatic into my ear.

"Will you tell me about the ocean?"

I stayed up until the sky flushed pink just explaining the types of life stuck against the bottom of the sea to his sleeping, demolished mind.

* * *

_Hello._

_I'm currently working on a few happy eremin fics and I needed a break to write something despairing yeah._

_I was stuck on what to do and I asked my parents for a good plot idea and they said "Something with dementia?" and this is what I spit out._

_I'm re ally sorry this suck a lot I suck a lot but I've been super down lately and haven't written in forever and schools starting but augh I needed to write eremin._

_So anyway, please enjoy, review, and have a nice day._


End file.
